Two important innovations in TerraME are its use of anisotropic spaces and of hybrid automata models. Anisotropic spaces arise when modeling natural and human-related phenomena. For example, land settlers in a new area do not occupy all places at the same time. They follow roads and rivers, leading to an anisotropic pattern. Anisotropic spaces are implemented in TerraME using Generalized Proximity Matrices (GPM). The GPM is an extension of the usual definition of the spatial relations and include a combination of neighborhood measures in the absolute space and in the relative space.

A hybrid automaton is an abstract model for a system whose behavior has discrete and continuous parts. It extends the idea of finite automata to allow continuous change to take place between transitions. Adopting hybrid automata in spatial dynamical models allows complex models which include critical transitions.

Download

In Windows, you can run TerraME by clicking in the icon on Desktop. In Mac and Linux, it is possible to run it by calling

$> terrame

using the command prompt. The graphical interface has options to run examples, configure and run models,
see documentation, as well as download and install additional packages. There are links to the source code
of the models as well as the examples in the documentation.

Editor

You can implement models in TerraME using any text file editor of your preference, such as Notepad++, Vim or Emacs. We currently suggest that you use ZeroBraneStudio as your programming environment to
develop models in TerraME. It is free and open source, but it is possible to donate to the project. After downloading and installing ZeroBraneStudio (ZBS), please execute the steps in the tutorial available here.

Checking if it was correctly configured

If Zero Brain is running, close it and open again. In Linux, to execute TerraME properly, you must run 'zbstudio' from the command line, instead of clicking in the ZeroBrane icon. This will allow ZeroBrane to get your 'TME_PATH'.

Go to File menu, and click New

In the main window (which is blank), write print(“hello”)

Save the file with .lua extension in your computer

You will see that the names print and “hello” will become colored

Go to Project menu, in Lua Interpreter, select TerraME

Click in the green icon with two triangles pointing to the right (Execute the current project/file)

If everything went fine, you will get the following text in the Output box in the bottom of Zero Brane:

Program 'terrame' started in [...]
hello
Program completed in [...] seconds [...]

You can run examples directly in the graphical interface of TerraME. Click in the Desktop icon to open it in Windows or run “terrame” in the command line to open the graphical interface. From the graphical interface it is possible to see the documentation of each installed package.

Courses

We use TerraME on our courses on Enviromental Modelling. We give regular graduate courses in the research programs in Earth System Science at INPE and Computer Science at UFOP.

Supporting Software

The TerraME modelling language is an extension of the Lua programming language and interfaces to TerraLib GIS library for archival and retrieval of geospatial data. Many thanks to the Lua and TerraLib teams for providing such good environments to build upon!

Acknowledgements

About

TerraME has been developed as a joint effort among Earth System Science Center (CCST/INPE), TerraLab (Laboratory for Modelling and Simulation of Earth Systems), at Federal University of Ouro Preto, and Image Processing Division (DPI/INPE).